Feb. 1, 2011--Former Gov. Howard
Dean (D-VT) and former Speaker Newt Gingrich engaged in a debate at The
George Washington University. This lively and thought-provoking
event stands as an example of how political debates could be conducted,
as opposed to the carefully staged and time-managed formats now so
prevalent in many campaign debates. The debate consisted of
opening statements, discussion
of five areas (health care, economy, national security/foreign policy,
immigration, 2012 elections), closing statements, and questions from
the audience. Watch it on C-SPAN.

Gingrich is expected to announce
his decision on a presidential campaign within a month or so.
Here is a transcript of his opening remarks.

...Obviously we disagree about the president, but I think that's so
obvious and so narrowly partisan it's not worth worrying about right
now. The important difference—I want to make two big differences
I think that will emerge as we chat.

The first is we are not a multi-cultural country. We are a
multi-ethnic country. There's a huge difference. Eighty
percent of the American people believe in American
exceptionalism. They believe that we're endowed by our creator
with certain unalienable rights. They believe in the work
ethic. They believe in private property rights. They
believe in people working with each other to produce a better
future. There's an enormous common American civilization which is
very different from Europe and its very different from Asia or Africa
or Latin America. And people come here to become American.

This is a very important debate we need to have, because our elites
would like to have us all to get amnesia and end up not understanding
the depth of American history and the depth of the American
experience. And why does it work here? Why can you be poor
in Somalia and do pretty darn well in America? Why can you be
poor in Haiti and do pretty darn well in America? Why can you
live in conflict in the Balkans, come here and actually work with the
very people you would have killed in a civil war? And yet somehow
we do something magic here and for the last two generations our elites
have been afraid to talk about it, afraid to teach it, and afraid to
get people to focus on it. That's very dangerous because
civilization is always only one generation deep.

Second. The great flaw—and it was a brilliant campaign, and
President Obama was an extraordinarily effective candidate, and I
recommend routinely to everybody David Plouffe's book, The Audacity of
, because I think he did a remarkable job and there's a lot you can
learn from it—but the core flaw in the 2008 campaign was that I
believe that candidate Obama actually believed the president of the
United States could save this country. That is impossible.
There are 513,000 elected officials in the United States. There
are 305 million people.

I think the TV series from my childhood that most reflects where we are
is an old program called "Wagon Train," in which Ward Bond played the
wagon-master. You know when Americans had wagon trains that moved
West, you didn't hire the wagon-master and say to him, wake me when we
get to Los Angeles. You had to have your own team, you had to
feed your own horses, you had to fix your own dinner; if you got
attacked you had to be part of the defense force. Everybody had
to pool along for the wagon train to survive.

We've got to have a fundamental change. And I'm not defending
Republicans or Democrats tonight. We need a fundamental change in
this country where we return power to localism, volunteerism, we
genuinely implement the 10th Amendment, and we understand that it is
impossible for a bureaucratic, centralized, Washington-based system to
effectively govern a country this size, and that we are in real
trouble.

And that's the last point I want to make. Your generation has a
rendezvous with destiny, as Reagan said quoting FDR. There's a
reason both those great leaders used that term. There are moments
in history that transcend normalty, and in those moments you either
stand up and make it work or your country collapses. We are in a
phase when the problems are so much bigger than George W. Bush, so much
bigger than Barack Obama, so much bigger frankly than Newt Gingrich or
Howard Dean, that if we don't figure out a way to have an adult
conversation among all of us and find a way to fundamentally re-center
our system in a localized, volunteeristic, genuine self-government
model, we are in deep, deep trouble as a country.